Search Results: "Christian Kastner"

26 May 2020

It's been two weeks since I purchased my first curved monitor. Switching away
from a flat panel proved to be a novel and unusual experience so much, in
fact, that within the first five minutes, I already wanted to return it.
Nevertheless, I gave it a try, and I'm glad I did, because not only did I
eventually get over the initially perceived issues, I'm now extremely
satisfied with it.

Shifted Perspective
My sole motivation for the switch was that I had become irritated (to a
probably irrational degree) by reading and writing text in whatever window
tile was on the left side of my desktop. Even though my previous monitor wasn't
a particularly large one with 24", the shift in perspective on the
far side of that window always made me feel as if I were reading something
to the side of me, rather than in front of me even if I turned to face it
directly.
It was time to try out a curved monitor.

Process
Purchasing something like a monitor is always a pain; there's just so much
choice. I would have preferred something with an IPS panel, 4K resolution, and
either a 27" or 32" size, and would compromise for a VA panel and WQHD
resolution. On geizhals.at, an Austrian price
comparison site, ~50 monitors satisfied those criteria. Further limiting the
list to reputable brands and reasonable prices still left me with more than
two dozen options.
Without going into the details why (I was just glad to be done with it), I
eventually settled for an
MSI Optix MAG271CQR,
a 27" WQHD monitor with a VA panel.
Once the new monitor arrived, I removed the old monitor from my VESA desk
mount, installed the new one, booted, and gave it a try.
Within the first five minutes of use, I made three key observations:

My shifted perspective issue on the sides was solved (great!), and

I had gained quite a bit of screen real estate (great!), but

Because of the curvature, the bottom task bar now looked bent (Oh Noes).

Now, point (3) might not sound like that big of an issue, but when you're
willing to change your monitor just because vim looks kind of weird to you when
it's window is on the left side of the desktop, then a bent-looking task bar is
a deal-breaker. I decided that I had to return it.
However, that meant: removing it, re-boxing it, shipping it back, etc. Tedious
work. As it was already mounted and connected, a friend encouraged me to give
it a day or two anyway, just in case.
That turned out to be great advice. I would never have expected this, but I got
over the bent-looking task bar issue pretty fast. The pleasure of a corrected
perspective on either side (everything just looks "right" now) more than makes
up for the bent-looking tar bar at the bottom; I don't even notice it anymore.
And the added screen real estate is a bonus I hadn't planned for.
The MAG271CQR targets the gaming demographic, and thus comes loaded with various
features. My new favorite is "Reader Mode", which has an effect quite
similar to "Night Mode" on mobile devices (reduced brightness, blue light
filter). My eyes barely tire anymore, even after a long day's use. It also has
a Picture-in-Picture mode for a second input which I haven't tried yet, but
should come in handy for SBCs and the like.

12 April 2020

It slipped my mind that the recent March 17, 2020, marked the 10th
anniversary of my first upload to the official Debian archive. How time
flies!
Although I was never much of a blogging person myself, I do enjoy reading other
people's contributions, and on some occasions felt that the Planet Debian feed
might have been a more appropriate medium for sharing a particular tidbit,
instead of sharing it with a specific mailing list, or not sharing at all.
So, to commemorate my anniversary, I venture into this new space.
first upload: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-changes/2010/03/msg01807.html

This upload made it necessary to rebase our dpkg on the version on sid again, which Niko Tyni and Lunar promptly did. Then a few days later 1.18.6 was released to fix a regression in the previous upload, and Niko promptly updated our patched version again.
Following this Niko Tyni found #823428: "dpkg: many packages affected by dpkg-source: error: source package uses only weak checksums".
Alexis Bienven e worked on tex related packages and SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH:

Package reviews
54 reviews have been added, 6 have been updated and 44 have been removed in this week.
18 FTBFS bugs have been reported by Chris Lamb, James Cowgill and Niko Tyni.
diffoscope development
Thanks to Mattia, diffoscope 52~bpo8+1 is available in jessie-backports now.
tests.reproducible-builds.org

All packages from all tested suites have finally been built on i386.

Due to GCC supporting SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH sid/armhf has finally reached 20k reproducible packages and sid/amd64 has even reached 21k reproducible packages. (These numbers are about our test setup. The numbers for the Debian archive are still all 0. dpkg and dak need to be fixed to get the numbers above 0.)

profitbricks-build4-amd64 has been fully set up now and is running 398 days in the future. Next: update coreboot/OpenWrt/Fedora/Archlinux/FreeBSD/NetBSD scripts to use it. Help (in form of patches to existing shell scripts) very much welcome! (Other help is much welcome (and needed) too, but some things might take longer to merge or explain )

Misc.
This week's edition was written by Reiner Herrmann, Holger Levsen and Mattia Rizzolo and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible builds folks on IRC.
Mattia also wrote a small ikiwiki macro for this blog to ease linking reproducible issues, packages in the package tracker and bugs in the Debian BTS.

12 July 2015

Debian is undertaking a huge effort to develop a reproducible builds system.
I'd like to thank you for that. This could be Debian's most important
project, with how badly computer security has been going.